


Try Again, Fail Again. Fail Better.

by SoberFrost



Series: The Good Soldier Who Left [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon), Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Alfred Pennyworth is the Best, Angst, Barbara Gordon is Oracle, Barbara and Jason Todd got along before he died, Batfamily talking, Bruce wants to be a good parent, Damian met Jason in the League of Shadows, Dick Grayson is struggling to be the good older brother, Even though he doesn't actually change much, Gen, Jason Todd Deserves Better, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Serious Batfamily issues, The Joker is still dead, bruce is a bad parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28443081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoberFrost/pseuds/SoberFrost
Summary: The Batfamily comes to grips with the wake of Jason's departure. Some truths are revealed, and one treacherous incident looms large over everyone.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon & Dick Grayson, Batfamily Members & Jason Todd, Cassandra Cain & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain & Barbara Gordon, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne
Series: The Good Soldier Who Left [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085054
Comments: 18
Kudos: 317





	Try Again, Fail Again. Fail Better.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for any mistakes. Everytime I tried to proofread it I kept rewriting stuff and having to start proofreading all over again so I just stopped.

"So let me get this straight," Steph started. "Jason dies. He comes back to life through some voodoo magic we still don't know about-"

"It wasn't magic, " Bruce interrupted, slumped in his chair at the Batcomputer. His cowl was off, but unlike everyone else who was present in their civvies, his Batman suit was still on. Everyone else had stripped out of their uniforms, the entire family convened after Bruce & Dick had confirmed that The Joker was truly dead. Tests at the coroners office provided a DNA match, but Bruce spent the rest of the night running a dozen tests in the Batcave to cover every possibility, including magic or a clone killed in his place.

The new for sure that The Joker was dead and that, despite the coroner's report indicating a quick death, he'd _definitely_ suffered for a least a short while before he died. And while the sun rose over Wayne Manor and Gotham itself seemed to bask in the glow of such great news, the Batcave remained gloomy as ever. Barbaba, Steph, Tim, Dick, Cass, and Bruce were all present, with Alfred coming back and forth from the Manor with various refreshments. Any enjoyment at the Joker's death had long been negated by the knowledge of who killed him, and Jason's subsequent departure with her.

"Except we don't know that," corrected Barbara. "We don't know anything about how Jason came back, except that the Lazarus Pit was involved, and that he dug out of his grave."

"Which we only know because he told us," Tim added, trying to rush past that last disturbing bit of information. He could still remember Dick puking on the rooftop after he heard the information, listening over the comms during one of Bruce and Jason's most heated confrontations. Bruce had been borderline manic after that, obsessively digging up the grave and looking for evidence that it was true. They found plenty in the form of broken nails, dried blood still in the soil, and a coffin that was obviously broken in from the inside.

Nightwing had to physically stop Bruce from buying the funeral company and then firing & blackballing every one of their groundskeepers on the grounds that they couldn't punish dozens of families for the mistakes of some employees that might not still even work there. It didn't stop Bruce from vowing to find out who exactly had been working, discovered his son's _freshly dug up grave_ and decided to cover it up to save their own ass. However, without Jason telling him when he'd come back, that investigation had thus far been fruitless.

"-Right. However he came back. He wakes up, and then Talia kidnaps him, and at some point he went into the Lazarus pit. And then at some point after that he showed up back in Gotham as the Red Hood. And now he's gone back with Talia after she killed the Joker?" Barbara continued, phrasing the last sentence as a question. She'd been late to the beginning of the meeting – occupied by Birds of Prey business – and was still wrapping her mind around the idea of Jason taking on _Talia al Ghul_ as some sort of mother figure.

"Yup," Cass said, popping the "p" at the end of the statement. She was curled up on one of the smaller chairs near the Batcomputer, but closer to Barbara than to Bruce. It =gave her a good vantage point to view the other members of the family, and all the emotions that was vibrating off of them in waves. _Pain. Hurt. Confusion. Anger. Guilt._ It hurt to watch them, Bruce especially, but she couldn't look away. As she well knew, this family struggled at times to convey their emotions with words. And sometimes, their struggled to convey the truth in general.

As if in mental sync with Cass's train of thought, Dick folded his arms and turned to glare at his adoptive father, an accusation ringing out. "That's everything, unless Bruce has some more information he's keeping to himself."

All eyes turned to Bruce, and Cass could see him feel _hurt, pain, guilt_ at the accusation and the slight tensing of his jaw as he remembered the numerous actions that justified the accusation.

"I've shared everything I know," Bruce answered, staring hard at his gauntlets. "Like I said earlier, my suspicions about Jason and Talia's relationship were just that, suspicions, until The Joker died."

"And we're sure that it was her?" Steph asked.

"Yes. She made a show of getting caught on the cameras all around the streets near Arkham, leaving and going, right around his time of death," Barbara said. She typed something into her laptop, and a series of still pictures went up on the giant screens of the Batcomputer, catching everyone's immediate attention. The most prominent image was the one post-dated right after the Joker's determined time of death: She was looking right at the camera, a predatory grin across her face that all but screamed _I won._ Damian and Cass were the only ones not to feel some level of immediate anger looking at the picture, but for different reasons. By contrast, the usually easygoing Dick looked murderous, even more so than the tense Bruce.

Out of everyone in the room, Dick related the most with Bruce on Jason, even more than Alfred: He was haunted by the way he'd originally acted when Jason was given Robin. He he'd blamed him for Bruce's behavior, loudly and repeatedly rejecting the opportunity to be a big brother or even a friend of any kind. Eager to point out his violent tendencies and quick to put him down, to the point that some of his own teammates had to call him out on it.

_"You're acting like a real Dickhead, and I don't mean in the funny way," Wally said, not bothering to mince any words. "Whatever problems you have with Bruce, don't take it out on Jason. He's just a kid."_

_"You don't know what you're talking about."_

_"With all due respect Dick, I think we do. He's our teammate too." Donna said definitively._

When Jason died, it was months before Dick could look at his poster of The Flying Graysons without feeling like a complete failure to his parents, the people who taught him the value in showing kindness to everyone, especially family. It was because of his failures with Jason that he put so much effort into being a good brother to Tim, Damian, Steph, and Cass. Even if Damian was rough around the edges, and Tim was standoffish with him ever since Damian became Robin, and Steph didn't really consider herself a true member of the family, and Cass sometimes seemed unreadable to him. It was better than leaving them to drift in the wind.

Leaving them to die alone in a warehouse while he gallivanted around in space, happy to be far away from Bruce & Jason.

When Jason came back, he came with all the violence and fury of someone who had been through Hell and remembered every second of it. It physically pained Dick to find the bodies left behind by The Red Hood. To hear himself or Bruce go through the same arguments with Jason over and over again. To see Jason reappear after the...incident, wearing a modified helmet. One that included armor for his neck.

But he'd been alive, and he'd been around. And now Talia took him.

"Look at her gloating," Dick seethed. "She was probably already calculating how far she can use killing the Joker to manipulate Jason."

Cass sat up and looked at the picture with a puzzled expression on her face. She honed in on the picture where Talia was staring at the camera, trying to get a read on it. It was harder to read body language from videos than in-person interactions. It was harder still to read pictures, and almost impossible to get a such a read on people as skilled as Talia.

But Talia wasn't hiding anything in this picture.

"No," Cass said suddenly, breaking up the anti-Talia tirade Dick was no doubt getting ready to start. "Her face…I see love. Relief. Anger. Not happy. Not evil." Her siblings, sans Damian, all exchanged looks, something that didn't slide by Cass.

It was Tim who spoke up first again. "Cass, I'm not doubting your…ability, but this is Talia al Ghul we're talking about and it's a still picture, and it's frackin' Talia. If there was ever a malicious, lying, deceptive, bi-"

"Watch your tongue Drake, that's my mother," Damian spat, speaking for the first time since the onset of the meeting.

"Well, your mother is abusing our brother," Tim added without missing a beat. The two boys may have left their days of physical violence towards each other in the past, but the tension and underlying dislike they had for one another coated almost every interaction between them. It led to otherwise uncharacteristic behavior between the two.

Like Damian looking at Tim with a sneer and firing back before realizing he was divulging too much information: "My mother _saved_ Jason, and has been protecting him since she first sat his catatonic body in front of me years ago and told me that he was my brother."

The youngest member of the Batfamily clamped his mouth shut immediately after the words left his mouth, regretting his word choice and simultaneously blaming his predecessor – _illegitimate predecessor_ he added mentally – for the error. Around him, the various members of the Batfamily looked on in various stages of shock, processing the information they'd just heard.

 _"What,"_ Barbara managed to gasp.

"You knew about Jason even then?" Dick exclaimed, just as Steph added "Why does Jason get first name basis?"

But the worst was Bruce, who had gone from slouching in the chair to ramrod stiff, immediately turning to give Damian a hard look.

"Explain," he managed to strangle out, trying to keep his fluctuating emotions under wrap, because Damian was looking at him with something akin to fear and _I can't have another son be scared of me. Another son that needs to seek protection from me._

Bruce felt Alfred's hand on his shoulder, and felt an immense sense of relief when he heard his father figure spoke. "What your father means, Master Damian, is that we would appreciate an explanation as to how exactly you met Master Jason, and what further information you may have about his time away from us."

 _Thank every deity for Alfred_ Bruce thought to himself as Alfred's words seemed to ease some of the tension Damian displayed.

"To begin with, Mother didn't kidnap Jason. She found him wandering the streets of Gotham in a walking coma, non-verbal and unresponsive to most commands, but still capable of fighting. She recognized him and brought him to grandfather's compound in Nanda Parbat."

Bruce wheezed. _Jason had been alive._ _He'd been alive and wandering around lost and needing help and needing **me** right under my nose and Talia found him first. _Alfred's hand squeezed his shoulder again, trying to ground him.

"I don't know many of the details after that," Damian went on. "I know that mother attempted to heal him herself, but his progress was too slow for Grandfather. If the whispers of the compound were true, he was interested in exploring how Jason was revived. Aside from that, I know what we all know: That it took the cumbersome nature of the Lazarus Pit to restore him to full health. I only saw him once after the Pit before mother sent me here for my protection. He…was not well."

None of them wanted to know what Damian saw in a post-pit Jason that unnerved him, and worried Talia enough to keep them separate.

"Why didn't you ever mention this? Or that Jason was in Gotham before?" Bruce asked, his voice noticeably straining to keep emotion from seeping through.

"Mother didn't want me to interact with him after he was tossed in the pit, and I didn't recognize that the Jason we knew as the Red Hood was the Jason I knew as _akhi_ [1]. Not for a long time. By then, I assumed that father had already made the same connection between Jason & Mother, and thus Jason's resurrection and wandering of Gotham. I saw no reason to bring it up."

"Why the hell would you assume that?" Tim asked, thinking of how different things could have been if he'd had access to this information earlier. If he'd been able to approach Jason the first time already knowing what was wrong and able to head things off before his big confrontation with Bruce happened and everything imploded. If he'd ever had a chance to really, properly have a relationship with Jason. Sure, they'd gotten to a point where he was able to be around Jason without worrying about being stabbed – or at least, worrying anymore than he did around Damian – but it was a far cry from the almost hero-worship he once held for his predecessor. Things got better after Damian assumed the title of Robin, _stolen from my cold, dead hands,_ and Jason started joking with him that he knew what it was like to be replaced.

_"Heh, now take a crowbar to the head, get blown up, and wake up in the Pit and maybe we can be twins," Jason cackled as he fired his grappling gun and flew off into the oblivion of Gotham's night._

Damian glared at Time, but didn't answer his question.

"Damian," Bruce garbled out, his patience wearing thin.

Damian gritted his teeth, before answering. "Jason was always found of pointing out all of Father's mistakes. I presumed he would have taken great pleasure in flaunting his resurrection right under your nose. I apologize for my mistake."

"An apology? If that isn't a first," Tim muttered, causing Steph to elbow him even as she hid a smirk of her own.

"Well forgive me Drake, for assuming that this family of detectives was competent enough to know the details of our most rabid members! Excuse me for presuming your knowledge of such basic facts!" he spat.

"Well sorry I didn't know about Jason's messed up past. I was too busy running the family business and dodging assassination attempts from the bio-spawn from hell. I guess I have just as much blame as the guy who knew all this information and didn't say anything!"

"That's enough!" Dick yelled, his voice echoing off the edges of the Batcave and stopping the burgeoning fight in its tracks.

He rubbed his temples before moving to physically insert himself between Damian and Tim, obviously putting Damian closer into his personal space. "Look we're not here to assign blame right now," he started, while Tim rolled his eyes in the background and muttered something about a "spoiled demon spawn", earning a pointed glare from both Dick & Cass. "But we need to find Jason. While we can still undo the damage that's been done."

"Don't bother, Mother will have hidden him well. Too well for us to find him for months, if not longer."

"We'll call the Titans. The Justice League, The Birds of Prey, everyone," Dick asserted.

"No. Bad idea." Cass said.

"How?" Tim asked confusingly.

"Too many people. We can't make...can't force Jason to come back. To be family. He needs to have a choice."

"We're not going to drag him back in chains, but he obviously isn't making the best decisions right now!" Dick cried out.

"Wonder where we learned that from," Steph jabbed, but her voice lacked humor. Of everyone present, only Barbara may have had a more objective viewpoint of the toxic traits that ran deep in the Batfamily.

"Cass is right," Barbara concurred. "Jason never reacted well to being cornered, and that hasn't changed at all. We can't go in guns blazing with a whole team, or it'll end badly. We have to do this ourselves."

"That'll take too long," Bruce declared gruffly, having gone back to staring at his gauntlets with the intense focus he always managed to find when combatting emotional expression.

"It'll give us enough time to think of a strategy that won't end in a violent confrontation. We can't afford to repeat mistakes of the past," Barbara retorted pointedly.

Bruce felt the unspoken words. _We need to make sure you don't screw up. Again._ In fact, he knew exactly which mistake she was thinking about. The details still haunted him: Jason's rabid body language. The Joker's insane laughter. The glint of the batarang as it left his hand. The shock on Jason's face as he registered the blood trickling out of his neck while the clown's disgusting laughter rung in his ears. His own frantic attempts to reach Jason before he pushed down on the detonator. The strong, almost irresistible urge to kill The Joker as he mocked him in the rubble of the explosion.

_"Heh, heheh, I think I've, hah, got a few broken ribs Batsy. Might have a punctured lung. You know, you've gotta get me to a hospital soon or I'll die. Can't let that happen now can we? Ahahaha. Can't let birbdrains #2 go down for no reason now can we!"_

The absolute horror and disgust that plastered Dick & Barbara's face when he returned to the cave, The Joker in a hospital and Jason's blood still on his gauntlets. The blank mask Tim had on in the background, the cowl footage from just an hour earlier playing on a loop in the background. Realizing that Barbarba and Dick were yelling at him, to the point of tears, but only being able to register Alfred slumped near the Medbay cots, unable to even look him in the face. His entire body quivering in shame, and righteous anger.

Alfred wrote his resignation letter that night. Bruce still didn't know if, or when, he was planning on turning it in.

"Wait, if Ra's was interested in Jason before, won't he still be interested?" Tim asked, breaking Bruce from his self-guilt spiral.

"Come to think of it, it's been a long ass time since the Zombie lord stuck his gross face in our business. What's he been up to all this time?" Steph asked.

"Grandfather is dead," Damian announced, once again surprising the other occupants of the Batcave.

"What do you mean he's dead?" Dick asked

"Mother killed him. She told me as much months ago. At the time, she informed me that she had acted to protect her son. I assumed that Grandfather had made some designs to kidnap me and she had acted to stop him. Now…I realize she may have done so to protect Jason."

"I'd say it's messed up that she straight up killed her dad and then told her kid about it but it's honestly probably one of the nicer things she's done," Steph commentated thoughtfully.

"Is there anything else you've been keeping secret?" Tim asked, his words conveying every bit of irritation he was feeling.

"I don't answer to such condescending tones, Drake."

"And I don't have to deal with such a little, pompous bi-"

"No!" Barbara snapped, stomping her fist on her wheelchair armrest. "None of of us have time for this! Work your issues out later, because we've got things to sort out right now." _Or better yet, maybe Bruce can actually do some parenting_ she thought, before mentally adding _I won't hold your breath._

Tim closed his mouth and resorted to scowling, while Barbara took her glasses off and rubbed them clean. One of her usual stress-induced tics. She took a deep breath and put her glasses back on before continuing. "Look, we're flying blind. We've been flying bind with Jason for years now. So, cards on the table, is there anything else that _anyone_ here knows about what happened to him since he's come back that isn't already well known knowledge?"

"He had training from Shiva & Deathstroke," Cass said. After some puzzled looks, she added "I recognize some of the moves. Especially Shiva."

"That explains so much," grumbled Tim, thinking about how quickly he'd been manhandled the first time he took on the Red Hood. And the second time. And the time with the fear gas. And the last time he'd pissed him off enough.

"Tt. It doesn't excuse your pathetically quick defeat at his hands when you were disgracing the Robin uniform, Drake."

A 10% more sleep deprived version of Tim Drake would have shot back something along the lines of _"I earned my position, I didn't just have the right DNA in my blood"_ , but as it was, he kept his mouth shut. _Because unlike the demon spawn from the depths of hell, I'm capable of showing basic decency._

"Is that everything?" Dick asked quickly, not wanting to give his two youngest brothers a chance to get into it again.

"Yea, don't take after your dad and not mention things like you know, 'My son come back from the dead may have taken a mortal frenemy and the mother of my other son as his pseudo-mom.'" Chipped in Steph.

"Yes," Damian answered, petulantly ignoring Steph's comment.

"No," Cass said, getting up from the chair and walking up to Damian. "You lied."

"About?" Barbara practically growled, her patience now completely gone.

"Earlier. When you said you thought we knew about Jason. About Jason knowing you. And being in Gotham. You lied. Why?"

Cass tilted her head sideways, her face inches away from Damian. Her eyes seemed to bore deeper than those of the other assorted members of his family, all staring at him with various levels of concern or suspicion, and Damian relented.

"I had to keep the information to myself, because if I had shared it with anyone they would have reported it to Father," he admitted.

"And that's a bad thing because?" Dick asked quizzically.

"Because, as his actions when saving The Joker for the Red Hood demonstrated," this time no one in the room could miss the immediate stiffening of Bruce's spine. "Father's judgement when Jason is involved is flawed beyond repair."

"Look, he's made mistakes, but-"

"I'd hardly count slicing his throat open a mistake, Grayson."

The entire room screeched to a quiet halt, almost as if someone had hit a pause button on a movie. Everyone froze at the vocalization of his words, the ugly truth they'd been dancing around finally out in the air. The unforgivable sin Bruce committed that they had all, in one way or another, forgiven him for.

Or at least, most of them had.

"What. The. _Fuck?_ " Steph asked.

"You're not supposed to know about that," Dick said, staring intently at Damian.

"Why? Because I'm a child?" the youngest snapped back. "Do you expect me to remain ignorant of these important details?"

"Because it happened before we even knew you existed. And no kid should know that their parent did that to one of their brothers. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience." Dick snapped, his eyes still on Damian but the harsh tone reserved for Bruce.

Steph turned to Tim. "Wait, did you know about this?"

"Yes. The question is, how the frack does Damian know? He doesn't have access to the cowl footage or the file on that night, and none of us told him. And like Dick said, it happened before we even knew he existed, if you can remember such a blessed time."

"Wait, so did you know about this?" Steph asked Cass, who gave her a somber nod, the topic already forming a bad taste in her mouth.

It happened before she'd arrived too, but she'd piecing it together from the disjointed, cautious, and in the case of Dick towards Bruce, downright hostile behavior the family was displaying. And their complete inability to discuss what had happened to Jason. When she finally found and watched the cowl footage, she wanted to smash her fists against the Batcomputers screens until they were bloodied to a stump because it was _so obvious_ to her how much _fear, desperation, anger, confusion_ Jason was showing.

And how much of the Lazarus was talking.

Discovering the events of that night had so shattered her faith in Bruce that she'd fled Gotham for Hong Kong. She spent months there trying to reconcile the infallible man with the utterly _broken_ shell that had her older brother's blood on his hands. The brother they had just found out was actually alive. The brother she hadn't even been properly introduced to, yet still felt so protective over. When she came back to Gotham, an admission of forgiveness in its own way, the relief Bruce felt was matched only by the overwhelming guilt he emanated. It was nothing compared to the _disgust, betrayal, anger_ that Jason showed the first time he laid eyes on her, his gaze fixed on the Bat symbol across her uniform. Emotions that he never stopped showing, even if they went from a roaring scream around Bruce to a simmering whisper around her or Babs or even Steph & Tim sometimes.

The flick of that Batarang was possibly the quickest, and most painful, way for her to realize just how flawed Bruce was.

"Why the _fuck_ am I the only one who didn't know about this?" Steph asked, angered by the revelation that she was sidelined _yet again_ by the other members of the Batfamily.

"Don't feel bad. We didn't even tell Cass. She just kind of figured it out." Tim answered truthfully, leaving out _Because none of us wanted to explain how Batman almost broke his number one rule on his own son._

"You guys didn't tell Cass?" Steph asked, looking to her best friend for confirmation. Cass nodded again.

"Rest assured Miss Stephanie, your exclusion was because of our inability to wish you the great pain and...disappointment of that night," Alfred offered, his stoic face briefly slipping into a pained look before he steeled himself again. "The question remains, Master Damian, how did you discover the events of that night?"

"Mother informed me."

"Of course. Of course Talia did. Now why would she go and do something like that?" Dick growled, throwing his hands in the air.

"So that I could understand that, despite the words of kindness and all this talk of family and acceptance, I needed to remember some of the lessons I learned from the League. That if I were to push the boundary too far, death was still a punishment."

"No," Bruce whispered in horror, the implication of Damian's words cutting him to the core. "I would never." _I would torture myself before ever doing that._

"Mother showed me Jason's cowl footage. I saw what you did," his youngest son answered, and Bruce felt like someone took a switchblade to his intestines because never in his worst nightmares did he imagine Damian believing he could do _that_ to him.

"No. Jason survived." _He survived my mistake. A horrible, terrible mistake._

"No thanks to you Bruce. Why you _left_ him behind to give that _animal_ medical attention, I'll never understand." Barbara added, more than a little venom in her voice. She'd made it clear that night, and several times since, that Bruce would never be able to redeem himself from that mistake in her eyes.

"Jason only survived because Mother rescued him. He was going to exsanguinate, with his throat cut open and his body trapped under the rubble. He lived because Mother caught wind of his foolish plan and arrived moments too late. She was able to retrieve him from the rubble and give him the necessary medical attention."

The switchblade was an axe now, and Bruce's mind was starting to go into overdrive. _He was dying. He was dying in rubble, under an explosion, again. He was dying just like in Ethiopia except I did it._

"How did we miss Talia?" Tim asked, his detective instincts kicking in.

"Honestly, didn't you all watch Father's cowl footage from that night? You couldn't have possible assumed Jason escaped with such an egregious wound by himself," Damian asked.

Barbara, Dick, Tim, and even Alfred, looked at each other somewhat guiltily. Cass looked furious. They _had_ made assumptions, because the police found no body and Jason turned up weeks later very much alive and still very violent.

"Damn," Steph muttered. "Damn, this is so many levels of fucked up."

"Trust me, we know," Tim answered dryly.

Damian let out a frustrated sigh. "The incompetence here is astounding."

"Damian. You have to know…" Bruce started, struggling for the right words as he tried to drag himself out of his spiral.

"It's ok Father. Outside of that error, your judgement has been impeccable. And it's been extremely helpful for me to know where the boundary is." He didn't add _e_ _ven if it has meant sparing Drake._ As much as he felt that it, now did not seem the appropriate time to verbalize those emotions.

"No, Damian, we don't, he didn't meant to…Bruce wasn't trying to hurt Jason," Dick sputtered. He was trying, just like had since that night, to reconcile the horrible act with the man he knew. "That was a mistake, one that we can't _ever_ afford to make but one that Bruce made regardless. We don't kill."

"Tt, Grayson, stop embarrassing yourself. Batman is incapable of making such egregious mistakes," Damian scoffed, his voice unwavering in it's certainty in a way that sent Bruce spiraling again and caused Dick's gut to curl. "And it's obvious that the enforcement of the rule only applies to the children under his care. Otherwise Father would never associate himself with the likes of Huntress or Katana, or even Kate Kane."

"Wow," Steph exhaled quietly. "Just, wow. This family has so many major issues. I don't even know where to start."

"I think it would be best," Alfred began grimly, eying Bruce's deteriorating mental state, "if we adjourned for an early breakfast."

…

Breakfast was a quiet, somber affair, that Bruce didn't participate in. Instead, he was left to his own mental faculties as the rest of the family tried to let Alfred's blessed cooking skills provide some comfort.

It didn't.

After breakfast, the family splintered into their separate ways. Steph went to crash in Cass's room, even though neither would be going to sleep for a while. Tim went up to his room with a giant mug of coffee and orders to sleep. Orders that he would ignore in favor of mentally going over every aspect of every interaction he'd ever had with Jason and calculating how the new information changed things. How each joke or pointed remark could be cast in a different light. Damian elected to take Titus out for a walk, both to avoid Dick's overbearing presence and to sort out how his withholding of the information may affect his standing in the family. Alfred busied himself with his normal duties and with Bruce still in the Batcave, it left Dick & Barbara alone in the game room, pondering everything in silence.

Dick was the first one to break it. "Looking over everything, there's been a clear running theme."

"Yea, that there is a serious void of leadership at the head of the household," Barbara answered.

"Not that. Talia." Dick replied. "Talia found him when he was wandering Gotham catatonic. On the same streets we patrol every night. Talia dunked him in the Lazarus Pit. Talia convinced him to stay in touch with her for who knows how long when we could barely convince him to come home for dinner. Talia told Damian about what happened between Bruce & Jason, and used it to twist his vision of what we are. Talia killed the Joker right under our noses, knowing what kind of effect that would have on Jason. And now, he's somewhere, isolated from us, all alone with her. Talia is dangerous. We have to get Jason away from her."

As he talked Barbara felt a growing level of resignation inside her. _Dick, if it was only that simple. If we could just point a bogeyman and blame them for everything._

"Look Dick, I'm not disagreeing with you. But once again, I think you're really overlooking how deep these problems run. Damian has been living here thinking that his own father could try to kill him. Tim has been shrinking away from the family in general since Damian arrived, but especially since the incident with Jason & Bruce. Alfred broke down completely. Cass literally left for months after what happened, and Jason is gone. Possibly for good. And as much as you want to blame yourself for all of that or pretend you can ignore some of it, you can't. And more importantly, you need to remember that Bruce is supposed to be the father here. Not you."

"I know I just…Bruce is Bruce and someone has to step up. And I can only fix one problem at a time," Dick said ashamedly, as if the words were some admission of horrible guilt. "And right now I have to focus on Jason." _And pray that everything else can be fixed afterwards._

"I love Jason too. But you can't force him to come back to someone who's hurt him over and over again."

"And what about the rest of us?" he asked quietly, almost afraid of the answer. _Do we get a chance at forgiveness?_

Barbara looked past Dick, to the loveseat in the game room that Jason would usually occupy while she was tutoring him. Limbs everywhere, hair a mess, and a sloppy grin on his face, he was always her favorite student. "There was a quote that Jason always used to say when I was tutoring him and he would get stuck on a problem. 'Try again, fail again. Fail better.' It was by Sammuel Beckett."

Dick let out a quick, choked laugh. "Alright, so yea, we've failed. But we'll try again and fail better this time. And we'll keep failing until we succeed, because I don't have a choice Babs."

"You're right Dick, you don't have a choice. Because in the end it isn't going to be up to you." Barbara let out a sad smile, her mind bringing back a memory of an extra cheeky Jason Todd getting ready for a particularly onerous Math exam. "We don't always get to succeed."

_"I'm telling you Bab-a-licious. I'm not gonna do any better in Math this unit. But I'm gonna fail better. Because sometimes that's all you can do."_

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic ended up almost double the size I expected because I struggled balancing dialogue and exposition in this fic and kind of just kept throwing up more of my Jason Todd/Batfamily feels until it felt like there was nothing left. It's a lot of rambling and more mixing and matching of canon timelines, but in case it wasn't clear, they all know about Bruce slitting Jason's throat, and it affects them in different ways. Basically it's causes a bunch of family angst, but in my canon the Batfamily stays together, just with a lot less faith in Bruce's infallibility.
> 
> Anyway, let me know what you think!
> 
> [1]Akhi is Arabic for brother. Or so google and the several Jason & Damian bro fics tell me.


End file.
